Archive: make money online

If you haven’t heard the news yet, Freelancer.com recently paid $3.2 million AUD (that’s roughly $3 million … and a steal of a deal considering that my estimations are that he shouldn’t be making less than $1 million a year right now, and Allen way under-utilizes the forum) to acquire the Warrior Forum from long time owner Allen Says. You can read the official post from Allen here.

There’s been a ton of speculation about what Freelancer might do with the Warrior Forum, but a lot of the speculation seems to be downright silly or stupid from a business standpoint, such as just redirecting traffic to Freelancer and so forth (no one in their right mind would do that to such a big and popular forum already making good money).

So I put together a list of what I would do if I were Freelancer, and what I really think they’re going to try to do in two different phases. Time will tell if I’m right, but I bet I am. :)

What Freelancer.com will do to the Warrior Forum — Phase 1

We already know that they lowered the initial WSO (Warrior Special Offer) pricing — the main marketplace at the Warrior Forum — from $40 to $20 to list your special offers for sale in their market (still costing $20 to “bump” it up again after a few days usually when it drops below page 3 in their forum marketplace), and we also know that they changed the War Room (a special sub-forum section where people share tips and give freebies) pricing from $20 one time to $20 / year.

However, in phase 1 I think their next step would be to introduce their own WSO network option where instead of users tracking their affiliate sales on the WSO forum through other WSO networks like JV Zoo and Warrior+ (or larger non WSO networks like Clickbank, Paydotcom, etc.) where most of those networks collect a fee per sale, they’ll have an option where you can use an option straight through the Warrior Forum itself.

Why does this make sense?

Simple, because it will mean more money in their pockets, and they can stand out by having more control over reviews, ratings, refunds, etc. than the other networks, which would give a major incentive to new users to use them.

Can they eliminate the competitors like JV Zoo, Warrior+, etc.?

Not initially — it’d be dumb of them to try to force WSO listings to go through them vs. just offering a big incentive to do so. They could piss off a large part of the community really quickly and risk the other networks trying to team up to drive the traffic outside of the forums altogether (something the other networks would be unlikely to do on a mass scale, but certainly could on a smaller scale with a handful of the vendors there).

So offering them as an alternative seems less intrusive and slowly builds their network. This will appease a lot of the members and prevent any major lash back, but that’s where phase 2 comes into play…

Phase 2 — The Takeover of the WSO Marketplace

Phase 1 will start right off the bat with some changes happening within the first few weeks, while the other parts might take a couple / few months to start up. After they start, phase 2 will happen anywhere from 6 months to one year later.

During phase 2 of this, Freelancer will already have their own competing marketplace in the WSO forum marketplace with a healthy portion of the WSO listings using them. Those listings will have extra benefits of easier ratings, more trustworthy reviews, more seamless integrations, etc..

And this is where the phase 2 plan really starts…

At that point in time, it’d be dumb of them to allow JV Zoo, Warrior+, and the others to really partake in their playground. It’d come off as less of a disruption if they kicked them out now vs. at the start, but they’ll have to go about it in the right way.

The best way to go about that would be to try to justify it for the better of the community, such as by saying that because of the reviews being abused by non-buyers or by the vendors themselves, they’re going to require that listings go through their own network so all of this can be verified for a better user experience (or something to that nature).

This will effectively be shutting down the other networks and giving nearly 100% control to their in-house network, which could mean massive profits for them.

But what will happen to JV Zoo, Warrior+, etc.???

For a short time, JV Zoo and Warrior+, who rely on the forum (despite what they may or may not admit) for their business, will try to act like that’s not a big deal and will act like they won’t need the forum, and they’ll do okay for awhile as they’ll have their band of loyal vendors that stick to them for awhile, but their lifeline will have been cut and without massive changes, they’ll likely die a slow and painful death.

The other networks that don’t rely on the forum will continue to obviously be just fine, though, and may even have a slight increase in activity during this time if everyone plays their cards right.

Could I be wrong???

Sure, I could be wrong (although I don’t think so), and there are a few possible moves that could change the above potential events slightly… For instance, Freelancer.com could make a lowball offer to buy one of the other forum networks.

I think it’d be kind of dumb of them to do that unless it’s a dirt cheap price (which the owners will be likely to turn down and will try to fight it out), but they’d have the benefit of starting with a base of users. However, unless it’s a dirt cheap price, they could easily get there themselves with controlling the entire forum to start with and being able to really push people into their new network if they create one (which almost certainly I believe they will).

Is it wrong of Freelancer to do this?

In short, no! If you drop $3.2 million, you have a right to try to get your investment back.

I’m sure many of you have heard of Fiverr. But if you haven’t, it’s basically where you can buy or sell literally almost anything for $5.

I feel like sometimes people are almost whoring themselves out for $5, but it just adds to the amusement of what people are willing to do for a few bucks…

But here’s the thing…

There’s a lot more to be made over at Fiverr if you do things right. Here’s how you can pile up some good paying customers and build a buyers list pretty quickly:

1. Offer some kind of a normally free or cheap service for $5 as a trial or as a starting point to a larger sale. For instance, maybe you offer to analyze their website and offer SEO suggestions for $5, but you then try to market an SEO service to them for something like $97 / month or so (or whatever). Or another example would be that you offer to help them pick out some kind of high price point product online (maybe they need help buying a tv, computer, jewelry, furniture, etc.) and for $5 you’ll help find them the best deal …. and then use your affiliate link when you give them the suggestion (ensuring that you get that cut off your suggestion).

2. Sell some “secret” or “tip” for $5 that is part of a larger package of yours. For instance, maybe you have a guide on how to improve your golf game — you can offer personal tips on how to improve their putting for $5 and hope that some buy your larger package.

3. Similar to #2, you can sell similar tips in the form of a newsletter or even just charge $5 to get them to sign up for your newsletter with all sorts of goodies. This builds a list of buyers and lines them up to buy more in the future.

4. Search for the “wanted” section there to see what people want, and then find a targeted customer base there and give them what they want using one of the other steps outlined here.

5. Contact any of the sellers of hot items / services and try to see if they’re willing to do a deal where you can sell their services for more to others …. and then market their services on forums, your mailing list, websites, classified areas, etc. for a huge market (or even hire some of those $5 offers to get them to market you — haha).

So that’s how you can turn $5 to a lot more and start making some easy money online over at Fiverr.

Wow, now that’s one long ass title, but quite fitting nonetheless. I always see people talking about what the best keyword tool is, and you’ll always get the typical responses: the sheep who just spout out what they already heard elsewhere without using anything themselves; the affiliates of one product vs. another product trying to either make a quick buck or justify their promos for the tool; and the drowned out voices of those who are giving an honest opinion.

Since Keyword Elite and Micro Niche Finder turned down my offer of saying their tools are the best keyword tools in exchange for a measly $2,000,000, I’m going to take the route of giving you my honest opinion.

Now, having said that, I already see some people assuming that I’m against Keyword Elite 2 and Micro Niche Finder — that’s completely not the case. Both are pretty cool tools, but I’m going to focus on the free keyword tools for now as many draw from the same sources …. it’s just in how they display the results and what features they have that make all the difference.

Having said that, Market Samurai essentially pulls its results from Google’s keyword generator anyway, and Google won’t try to sell you other stuff.

Google’s keyword tool is pretty nifty, and if you enter in a few relevant keywords, especially more long tail keywords, you can get some very relevant results that will show you how many searches they get a month, how competitive it is to advertise there, etc..

I love this tool and use it all the time, especially because it’s web-based and very easy to access.

The only major downside to it is that they don’t really allow you to sort the results easily. It’s still easy to see mostly what keywords are good and what ones are bad, but it’d be nice to offer more filtering features.

That’s where Market Samurai comes into play. The interface I don’t like nearly as much as Google’s own keyword tool, but they do a nice job of allowing you to sort through the results, rank the results by order of traffic or competition level, etc..

Since the keyword tool on Market Samurai is free anyway, I say use it if you’re going through HUGE keyword lists. They have some nifty filtering features that make it worthwhile.

However, since it’s desktop based, if you’re looking for a quick search and aren’t wanting to sift through hundreds of results, Google’s own keyword tool is just fine and easier.

Now, having said that, here’s my personal tip for finding awesome keywords: focus on keywords that get AT LEAST 1,000 searches per month and have at least a little Adwords competition (meaning that at least someone finds value in that keyword). Then see if domain names that are .com, .net, or .org are available with the keyword phrase in them (like [keyword phrase].com). If they are available, grab one (ideally .com, then .net, and then .org in order of preference).

Then make the keyword phrase your page title (what appears at the very top of the browser on any webpage), and you should have a decent chance of getting ranked well doing just that. Your chances will go up even more if most of the search results in Google don’t have the keyword phrase in their page title — to find out, do a search with the phrase in quotes on Google and check out how many sites have the keyword phrase within the page title (the blue link). If not many do, you have an awesome keyword to go after.

Comments / opinions — please leave them below.

My next two reviews will deal with traffic and leads, and both of those will have some awesome tips to get rich online … or at least make a little extra dough….

So if you’ve been reading anything on my blog for the last couple weeks, you know that I started giving out different online money making ideas. I plan to continue that indefinitely with at least one new method a week or so …. unless I get lazy …. then it might take longer than one a week …. but hopefully I won’t get lazy. :)

I have a BOATLOAD of methods that I’ve tried, and I have a smaller boatload of methods that actually worked for me (still in the dozens). However, rather than have all of the ideas come from me, I thought it’d be fun to get all of my readers involved in it ….. and non-readers too — I’ll spread the love …. as long as there’s no crabs or anything like that coming with it…..

So here’s the deal:

Submit any / all of your money making ideas to me at cantgetrich [at] gmail.com.

By doing so, you’ll be giving me permission to use and talk about that money making method.

If I post the method and it’s actually good, I’ll Paypal you $10 and post a link to you for credit (if you want a link / credit). If it’s not that good of a method … well … I probably won’t be posting it anyway so that doesn’t matter.

(But wait, there’s more! ….. including more money in it for you!)

Please have the methods be at least somewhat unique and not standard stuff — if you say “write a review of a Clickbank product with your affiliate link” and don’t provide any other tips or information or specifics on that, don’t be expecting me to post that (although you certainly could provide more details or tips on how to do a CB review and get it posted).

And to top it off…

The best one that I receive the first week will get a $100 Paypal prize.

So there you have it — not only will I enter you into a contest for a $100 Paypal price, but I’ll also PAY YOU if you have a good enough money making method that makes this blog AND you’ll get a link to your site. I’m pretty f-ing awesome, aren’t I?

Two Random Announcements …… well, one is more like a rant:

First, the rant…. I know this is off topic, but it’s my blog so I get to be off topic when I want (dammit!). I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick and tired of reviews of products that are either worthlessly just trying to get an affiliate commission or just whining or bashing the product (that’s right folks, it goes both ways) … often times never even using the product or giving it a fair chance.

This past week, I’ve seen worthless products getting praised up the wazzoo, as well as awesome products get bashed.

Pretty soon I’m going to start writing product reviews and summaries WITHOUT an affiliate link and WITH awesome advice on how to use them (or at least how I use the products) with the good, the bad, and the f-ing ugly.

Announcement #2: This blog will be undergoing some minor maintenance sometime in the next day or two, so it might temporarily be down for several hours. If that happens, don’t panic, take a paxil, and chill until I get back.

On my last post, I talked about how you can buy up sites for cheap at one place and sell them for more at another place. One commenter left a comment saying that this method may have worked a few years ago but not any more — I beg to differ, as I do this myself to this day, as do dozens of others. However, he / she would be right in that it might not be deadbeat easy your first time, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a very easy way to make a couple hundred dollars whenever you want.

However, this next method IS deadbeat easy and can be done on a smaller scale or a super large scale with ease. It’s also related to the Easy Make Money Online Method #1, but I much prefer this one and it can be a great source of recurring income.

Here’s what you do:

1. Do one (or more) of the following:

A) Search for a worker who performs a web-related service (or post an ad) on a site like Craigslist (or any other such site). Doesn’t matter if it’s a U.S. worker or Filipino or whatever (Filipino workers can be found searching the Philippine section of these sites).

B) Find an existing service package from a worker on a forum or classified site like above, but make sure that the package price is reasonable / cheap.

2. Then either raise the price of the package or add a few more tasks to the service to increase the perceived value (without increasing the price much). What’s that you say??? You want some examples??? You bet! Example numero uno — find an article writer who writes articles and instead of just charging more per article, sell a combined package of a bunch of articles, submission to article directories, keyword optimization, and so forth (you can keep going and make it a larger and larger package). You can even combine it with simple stuff like blog commenting, forum posting, etc.. Example numero dos — find a backlink builder or commenter and put a large package together with xxx amount of links or comments.

Then not only can you charge a lot more than what your raw labor costs are, but you can take this to the next level and turn it into a monthly service to charge a monthly fee for both examples. There are literally hundreds of different ways you could make money here with this, but these are just two easy examples.

3. Now that you have your team or service put together and profits figured out, it’s time to get more people to buy your service. To do this, I recommend doing the following:

A) Post in the services section on sites like Craigslist.

B) Post your service on forums that offer free or cheap advertising (like the Warrior Forum) — there are tons of these. This can be one of the easiest ways to get tons of sales.

C) Search the web and the above places for people that might be interested in buying your service and let them know about it.

D) Mail your list (if you have one) with the offer (it’s easy enough to whip up a simple sales page for it or hire a designer for $100 to do so), or start to approach potential joint venture partners with your new service — you can even offer to brand it in their name so they can either take a cut of the profits or just sell it for more than you.

E) If it’s a good enough offer that converts, after you have a webpage for it (note that you don’t need one for most of these methods), you can do paid advertising like banner ads, PPC, etc. to test out the conversions there, but I only suggest this method after doing the above and having luck with those, as you definitely don’t have to spend a dime to make mucho money here.

Once you do this well, there’s awesome tools out there (more on that later) to do this 100x faster, but they’re not needed to start making money here.

And that’s it! Easy enough, right? I thought so… :)

Stay tuned, as in addition to some more cool money making methods of my own, I’m going to spice up the next post a bit and offer everyone here a contest to win some $$$$$.